This week marks the 10th anniversary of Facebook, and to help commemorate this milestone CIPR Director Michael Zimmer wrote an essay for The Washington Post that postulates an early framework of Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of privacy, based on a preliminary analysis of the data contained in The Zuckerberg Filesarchive.

Here are the three principles Zimmer discusses:

Information wants to be sharedUpdating the 1960s techno-activist slogan “information wants to be free,” Zuckerberg clearly believes that “information wants to be shared,” and that the world will be a better place if we start sharing more information about ourselves.

While comments from Zuckerberg in 2004 and 2005 point to a desire to simply position Facebook as a “really cool college directory,” as the social network grew, so did his vision. In a 2006 blog post apologizing for the controversial rollout of the News Feed feature, Zuckerberg described his motivation this way: “When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better.” A focus on “helping people become more open, sharing more information” started to emerge in Zuckerberg’s rhetoric by 2008. And by 2010, in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Zuckerberg argued that sharing more information — your photos, your opinions, your birthday, for example — would make the world a better place: “If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.”

Privacy must be overcome

In his initial public comments about what was then thefacebook, in a Feb. 9, 2004, article in the Harvard Crimson, when Facebook was only five days old, Zuckerberg bragged about the site’s “pretty intensive privacy options.” He also acknowledged that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his tarnished reputation following student outrage over his earlier Web site, that hot-or-not-inspired Facemash — uproar that was well-depicted in “The Social Network.”

From the start, Zuckerberg knew that privacy would be a significant factor in Facebook’s success. He regularly mentions the site’s “extensive privacy settings” in blog posts and interviews during the first few years of operation. But in many ways, Zuckerberg appears to view privacy as a barrier to the openness that his first principle demands.

This is most evident in a 2008 interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, when he noted, “four years ago, when Facebook was getting started, most people didn’t want to put up any information about themselves on the Internet. . . . So, we got people through this really big hurdle of wanting to put up their full name, or real picture, mobile phone number.” Later in this interview, Zuckerberg predicted that the amount of information people will share online will double each year, and the best strategy for Facebook is to be “pushing that forward.”

Control is the new privacy

When Zuckerberg does talk seriously about privacy, he almost always cites control. Zuckerberg’s apology for the launch of News Feed notes that his original vision for Facebook included the fact that users must “have control over whom they shared [their] information with.” His response to backlash over a change in the site’s terms of service in 2009 was aptly titled, “On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.” That statement doesn’t mention the word “privacy,” but instead declares, “Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant.” In an interview with Time magazine in 2010 Zuckerberg declares: “What people want isn’t complete privacy. It isn’t that they want secrecy. It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.”

CIPR Director, Michael Zimmer, has launched a new project called “The Zuckerberg Files“, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It includes transcripts and bibliographic data of all publicly-available content representing the voice and words of Zuckerberg, including blog posts, letters to shareholders, media interviews, public appearances and product presentations, and quotes in other sources.

The Zuckerberg Files is hosted on the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Digital Commons, and consists of two digital collections. The “Transcripts” collection include full-text transcriptions of all the content in the digital archive of Zuckerberg’s public statements. The “Videos” collection represents a subset of the collection with archived copies available video files documenting certain Zuckerberg appearances.

CIPR is pleased to welcome Dr. Annette Markham, a renown internet researcher who focuses on areas of social media, ethics, and qualitative methods, to hold an informal workshop with SOIS PhD students on Remixed Methods for Qualitative Research.

We will be discussing Dr. Markham’s recent article, “Remix Cultures, Remix Methods: Reframing Qualitative Inquiry for Social Media Contexts” (PDF), where she discusses some of the complications associated with studying internet-mediated contexts, and offers a research centered definition of remix. Dr. Markham describes particular elements of remix that have proven to be valuable pedagogical tools for helping disrupt traditional frames for conducting qualitative research in digital contexts: Generate, Play, Borrow, Move, and Interrogate.